Unbecoming

In these – appropriately – thirteen stories, Mike O’Driscoll plays with our imagination and expectations, subverting the horror genre whilst embracing its conventions. What results is a strangely brewed cocktail of terror: dark, dangerous, and sometimes downright dirty, O’Driscoll’s stories get under your skin and into your head, where the freedom to prowl the peripheries of your consciousness becomes addictive. Uncompromising and unflinching, this is modern horror at its very best.

A man becomes obsessed by noise, another finds himself reduced to shadow, children are coveted by the perverse antithesis of loving parents, and artists stretch the limits of their capabilities. Acknowledging sensations that all is not right with the world, the characters twist and turn with each cut from life’s rusty knife: seeking redemption, finding none.

O’Driscoll writes horror from the inside out.

"Identities in crisis, lives falling apart. Wherever Mike O’Driscoll’s stories are set – downtown LA, Soho medialand or the Gower Peninsula – the light is fading to a dusky noir but his characters are still recognisable as people you know. Compassion as real as the horror: O’Driscoll doesn’t do inauthentic. The monster within is pissed off." – Nicholas Royle, author of Antwerp (Serpent’s Tail)

"Mike O’Driscoll writes mysterious, sometimes convoluted, utterly chilling stories. I’ve been reading – and sometimes publishing – his work for many years and am delighted that it’s finally available in this fine collection." – Ellen Datlow, Co-Editor of Year's Best Fantasy & Horror

Contents:

• We Will Not Be Here Yesterday
• That Obscure Object of Desire
• Shadow
• In the Darkening Green
• Unbecoming
• Evelyn Is Not Real
• The Hurting House
• Sounds Like
• Rare Promise
• If I Should Wake Before I Die
• Hello Darkness
• The City Calls Her Home
• The Silence of the Falling Stars